Pronunciation, Phonesthesia and Realia: The case of the STRUT vowel (part 1)

With the release of Adrian Underhill videos, I can now re-live some of the presentations of the IPA that my Phonetics tutor and trainer, Prof. Graciela Moyano, introduced when I was a first year student at College. It's just brilliant to go back to those moments of discovery of how our articulatory system works.

Adrian Underhill's phonemic chart. (I would probably do away with the centring diphthongs as they stand, using /ɛ:/ for /eə/ and maybe still keep /ɪə/)

I have completely embraced Adrian's belief and knowledge that "pronunciation is physical", and this motor side of pronunciation and our awareness of articulation through the different "buttons", as he calls them, is essential. However, out of his presentations, my independent reading, and my own teaching style, I have found that part of the process of acquisition of L2 features also lies on the images that we make of what the L2 features sound like.

Over the years, I have discovered that part of the fine-tuning processes we need to carry out to learn the sounds of L2 also involve affective aspects, including our own affective memory, and feelings. I have experienced situations in which students appear to be making the right articulatory movements, and still, there is something in the quality of the sound that does not "sound right". And in those cases, what I noticed is that it is the recourse to mental and affective images related to the sounds that appear to do the trick, rather than just the right lip or jaw position.

So in this post (which is, obviously, not a report on experimental research, so don't expect it to be so!), I will be going over a few techniques that I have used to include phonesthesia and realia in my pronunciation teaching. My focus this time will be on the STRUT vowel, /ʌ/, one which gave me a lot of trouble as a learner!

I will be covering a few different theoretical and practical areas on this post, which is why it will be divided into two:

Part 1: 

• Speech Perception theories: a review with links to further reading materials.
• English vowel STRUT /ʌ/and Spanish vowel /a/: a review.

Part 2:

• Tips and tricks to teach STRUT
• Articulation
• Realia
• Phonesthesia

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Images, Categories, and Speech Perception Theories

When writing my research paper for my specialisation course in Phonetics I in 2006, I came across a huge number of acquisition and psycholinguistic theories which really helped me to make sense of and inform my teaching practices. Even though I am not an expert in acoustic or perceptual matters, I believe that some basic knowledge of theories of Speech Perception can actually aid our comprehension of what happens to our learners when faced with L2 pronunciation challenges.

Speech Perception Theories state that perception is categorical and not continuous (Liberman, 1985), that is, we perceive categories, no matter whether there is individual variation, and thus, we group sounds according to our perception. We can, in other words, say if a certain set of sounds are the same, or if they are different, despite the realisational differences of those sounds. The Perceptual Magnet Effect theory by Kuhl (1991) addresses similar issues for vowel sounds, by exploring in more detail how we can perceive the space or distance between the different variants we hear, to somehow establish what degrees of variation can be significant for us to associate a certain sound or stimulus to either another category, or to a "bad" (so to speak!) version of the category under scrutiny. This all appears to work pretty well for our L1, though there are a few "traps", as the McGurk effect reveals, when the information that the different senses provide do not appear to match:

If anything, the McGurk effect proves that we draw information from different multimodal sources, which is a very useful thing to know for those of us who train in L2 perception and production!

Now, when it comes to perception of L2 sounds, the "same-different" categorisation may fail, as we tend to interpret our L2 sounds from our own L1 targets, as Flege's Speech Learning Model (1995) states. So if we consider Kuhl's and Flege's models, we can predict that certain L2 qualities, if close to certain L1 targets, will be perceived as similar, and thus, learners may take longer to acquire them and create new categories for them.

Our learners, then, may create a mental image of what a particular L2 segment sounds like in the light of their already-existing images of the sounds in their L1. This means that in order to improve perception and production, we need to create new images and categories that will establish a perceptual distance between L1 and L2 sounds.

So in this post, I would like to explore the fact that one of the ways in which we can displace the L1 images in favour of L2 categories is by creating images that may exceed the information that the visual and tactile senses can give us for the articulation of the sound, and even the auditory information we can initially get. I would like to propose ways in which affective and visual memories can activate these new sounds in the shape of perceptual images.

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The STRUT /ʌ/ vowel in General British

Cruttenden (2014:122) describes the STRUT vowel as a "centralised and slightly raised CV [a]" and he acknowledges the presence of a back-er quality [ʌ̞̈] in Conspicuous General British speakers, though this quality also appears to be heard more often in GB (I agree! See below). The jaws are said to be separated considerably, and the lips, neutrally open. There is an MRI of a phrase containing STRUT in Gimson's.... companion website here.

Collins and Mees (2012) have defined STRUT as a central, open-mid checked vowel, and admit a certain degree of variation, but especially in terms of fronter qualities. In much the same way, Mott (2011:117) describes STRUT as being "slightly forward of centre, just below half open, unrounded".

The abovementioned authors would then place STRUT somewhere around these areas:

Dark purple: STRUT, according to Mott & Collins and Mees. Light purple: Cruttenden (2014) and the backer quality [ʌ̞̈] he describes as a variant.

Geoff Lindsey has a great post called "STRUT for Dummies" with a myriad audio examples that illustrate his comments on the historical and present variation of STRUT, wavering between [ə] and [ɑ]-like qualities.

Many Argentinian colleagues and I believe that STRUT appears to be moving closer now to an [ɑ] quality, at least for many young speakers. I cannot claim to have the knowledge or "ear" that Lindsey happens to be blessed with, but here's an example of what I believe I hear pretty often:

Compare this young YouTuber Zoella's versions of "love", "until", "one", "somebody", "bump", "tummy", "just", "hundred". Apart from being great examples of intra-speaker variation (I personally don't hear all the versions of the word "love" with the same STRUT quality), there are some other interesting processes going on . (Also, a great taste of the kind of TRAP vowel I hear now, so different from General American versions!).

(BTW, according to Wikipedia, Zoella is from Wiltishire, and currently living in Brighton. What would you say her accent is?)

If we see these variations in acoustic terms (disclaimer: not at all my area of expertise...yet!), we can find in Rogers (2000) there is a table presenting formant values for RP vowels, based on a measurement of adult male speakers in Gimson, 1980. In that measurement, RP /ʌ/ has got the following values:
F1: 760 Hz
F2: 1320 Hz
( Confront with the values that the study by Wells in his 1962 study  had established F1:722, F2: 1236 )

(BTW, in simple terms, F1 inversely represents the articulatory tongue height, so that its higher frequency value represents lower tongue height. F2 represents degrees of backness, with lower values representing back-er vowels).

A study conducted by Hawkings and Midgley (2005) in four different age groups found the following mean formant values for these age groups:

• F1:630 -F2:1213 for over 65s (higher than the previous studies mentioned, and a bit backer)
• F1:643 F2:1215 for those speakers between 50-55 (lower than the over 65s, but equally central-back)
• F1:629 F2:1160 for speakers in the age range 35-40 (higher than those 10 years older, and backer)
• F1:668 F2:1208 for speakers aged 20-25 (lower than the other groups, but not as back as those speakers a bit older)

So according to this study, in comparison with the previous measurements reported, it would appear to be the case (at least for the speakers surveyed) that younger generations have a lower, and to a small degree, back-er STRUT than older generations).

If you are interested in pursuing this further, there are some interesting studies by
Ferragne and Pellegrini (2010), measuring vowels in 13 British accents.
Sidney Wood (SWPhonetics) analysis of different RP speakers' vowels across time.

***
Riverplate Spanish Vowel /a/

A contrastive analysis between General British and Riverplate Spanish (RS), and also the contributions of Speech Perception theories would lead us to expect that those students with RS as L1 are very likely to interpret English STRUT in the area of Spanish /a/ (not to mention distributional differences!). (BTW, in 2013 I attended a talk by Andrea Leceta at the III Jornadas de Fonética y Fonología, in which a comparative and experimental study on these features had been made, and the results confirmed these expectations. The proceedings have not yet been published, I am afraid.)

García Jurado and Arenas (2005) discuss Riverplate Spanish /a/ as having a wide degree pharyngeal of constriction (following the studies by Fant (1960) that focus the analysis of vowels based on the levels of constriction along the vocal tract) and clear oral opening and lack of lip rounding. They establish a mean F1:800 and F2:1200 values, which appear to match the degree of backness found for current versions of STRUT, though Spanish /a/ is much lower than English /ʌ/. 

Location of Spanish /a/ by Mott (2011)

You can see a cross-section of the articulation of /a/in Spanish and in English in these captures from the University of Iowa's Sounds of Speech app.

 Spanish /a/

(American) English /ʌ/


***
There appears to be an interesting similarity between Spanish /a/ and GB English /ʌ/ that lies mostly in the central part of the tongue employed, and an interesting difference, that is related to the height of the vowel and the level of jaw dropping, much higher than in Spanish, although they are both mid-to-low vowels. And still, it appears to me -and this is a very personal appreciation- that it is not jaw-dropping alone that makes our RS /a/ different from GB  /ʌ/. And my teaching of the sound over the years has also proven to me that jaw-dropping alone does not do the trick.

It may or it may not make sense to teach the exact quality of this sound to RS speakers, and it will depend on whether the focus of the lesson is on accentedness or on intelligibility, but the truth is that for an RS speaker, there needs to be a contrast between the three different qualities making up the contrast STRUT-TRAP-BATH in English, which to RS speakers may be only subsumed into one. 

So the next part of this post, coming up in a new weeks, I will present some "tips and tricks", rooted on some phonesthesic ideas, and also on realia techniques, that may help RS speakers turn their Spanish /a/s into STRUT.



After-post addition:
A reader rightly pointed out that I have not presented audio examples of my own of the difference between both sounds. So this is how I pronounce Spanish /a/ and English /ʌ/, and below you will find two Praat captures of the spectogram and formants of the same versions:

My Spanish /a/

My English /ʌ/

Analysing "errors": My "shame" list

When I first considered writing this blog, I thought of it as an answer to all my quandaries during my lessons. I was thinking of my students first, in fact. But now that I've embarked on this blogging adventure, I have noticed that I find my own processes fit for analysis, and that I can forge a better path for my students if I retrace my steps as a learner. Well. To be honest, I don't think I've ever stopped being a learner, myself.

This is why this blog post is going to address another of my obsessions with pronunciation which is part of my Evernote Moleskine notebook, travelling with me in my mobile and my bag. I humorously, and dramatically, call it....

The SHAME list!

Image credit:"De Paso Arte"

My "shame-on-you!" list includes a number of words that I have mispronounced systematically (or still do, at times!) (Now, I am not going to reveal his name, but there is a friend and great colleague of mine who also keeps one of these..... ;) ). This post, then, will examine some of my versions of these words, and an attempt at an explanation for my mispronunciations.

Warning! The words "error", "mistake", "mispronunciation" will appear a number of times in this post for the purposes of discussing some of the common views on this aspect of the learning process. I try to adopt a positive view towards error, try to be analytical towards it, and that is the spirit of this article.

***

A bit of theory first. There are different categorisations of "mistakes" around, and one of the views on "error" I first found attractive while a student at College was that outlined by Julian Edge (1989), in his book  Mistakes and Correction. In a nutshell, what I particularly liked about it was this division between:

• slips: those "mistakes" made due to lack of proper attention, which, if pointed to, the student can self-correct.
• errors: those mistakes we make which include features that have been systematised by teachers but which have not yet been "internalised" or "appropriated" or "automatised" by us; 
• attempts: those mistakes which involve the student's experimentation with features that have not been taught, or the overapplication of rules into other contexts.

This leads me into another view that considers the source of error. This great article from Macquairie University explains this very neatly, and I would also like to make a point of some of these categories here:

• Transfer from L1 errors: we all know that we tend to interpret foreign sounds from the filter of our L1 phonology, and as I have discussed in previous posts, the closer to L1 we interpret a foreign sound to be, the more likely we will have more difficulty in learning it (Flege, 1987 and others). Many interlanguage mistakes, then, imply the production of an L1 sound for an L2 quality which we consider to be approximate, or just because it is the only quality we have "at our disposal".
• Spelling-to-Sound errors: these can be fully blamed on the irregular spelling of English (especially if the student uses a transparent, phonetic language as L1), and of course, you can then curse (or enjoy!) the history of English! (I've been reading a great book by David Crystal on this, highly recommended!). Students may merely apply an L1 sound to an L2 spelling looking similar to an L1 spelling, or interpret an English spelling he/she knows about into a context where in fact it is not associated to the sound in quesiton: bʌtcher for /ˈbʊtʃə /, for example.
• Hypercorrection errors: this consists in the overapplication of a rule that does not fit into a context the student believes it should apply to. My secondary school students, for example, apply the /ɪd/ ending in contexts with sibilants, through analogy of the third person singular suffix rule: [wotʃid] for /wɒtʃt/.
• Performance errors: this refers to the errors that may be "instilled" by the challenges of a particular task, that is, lack of weakening by some students when reading aloud, or overchunking when producing spontaneous speech, etc.

A note on another error-related issue. The transfer vs developmental debate: This is a very interesting way of looking at errors. As we have seen before, there are many common mistakes that reveal that the student is actively making hypotheses as to what the language "sounds like", and these cannot be truly seen as transfer/interference errors. At times we are so used to hearing some of these, that we fail to see that several mistakes are actually attempts towards a sound that may bring about difficulty. Take the sound /dʒ/, quite rarely at times used in Spanish as an allophone of /ʒ/ (Yes, another debate as to whether /ʒ/ can still be taken to be the phoneme used for <y, ll> spellings in Riverplate Spanish over [ʃ] or the other way round. Long story! No time to draw on this here!). The video of a local celeb, Susana Gimenez, shows different renderings of the word "you" and some (not all, though) have [dʒ]:

(Sorry about this!) Now. When our students say [ʃip] for "jeep", they are not necessarily transferring this from Spanish, as a true instance of transfer would probably be something like [xip]. This pronunciation which makes our students' rendering of "jeep" homophonous with "sheep" reveals that our learners feel this sound is different and approximate it to a quality they may be more familiar with.

A hypercorrection mistake in this respect may be our students' use of [ʒ] for /ʃ/, as when they say "shopping" as [ʒopin], for example. This is becoming a bit of a sociophonetic feature, as I can easily identify some features of the social background of those students who generally pronounce this this way.

OK. Back to my own errors, then. My own "shame list".

***

 The horror! :p  List 1: [eɪ] for /æ/
The words below stayed fossilized in my interlanguage for a long time. They surely responded to my overapplication, hypercorrection of the /eɪ/ for "a" rule:

*eneɪmel, teɪpestry, eɪbbey (!)

for General British /ɪˈnæməl̩, i-,  ə-/, /ˈtæpɪstri, -ə-/, /ˈæbi /
(Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD) (Wells, 2008), English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD, 2011) edited by Hartman, Roach and Setter )

There was a sort-of famous song by a local rap band, here, called "Abbey Road". I guess I will have to blame them (ha!) for my serious mispronunciation of this placename while in London in 2010 (felt sooo ashamed!):

In the opposite direction, I remember having problems with the word apron, which I produced as [ˈæprən ] instead of /ˈeɪprən /, and [ˈæprɪkɒt ] for /ˈeɪprɪkɒt, -rə- /  .

List 3: Word Stress
Again, I guess some of these errors stem on either the hypercorrection of the Teutonic tendency towards early stress:  ˈcoincide,  inˈnovative or the overapplication of my perception of the French tendency towards late stress: maˈssage, misˈchief, emploˈyee . I could have also "fallen pray" to the influence of American English.
The proper word stress according to the cited versions of LPD and EPD goes:  /ˌkəʊɪnˈsaɪd, -ən- /, /ˈɪnəvətɪv, -veɪ-, ɪˈnəʊvətɪv / (Wells 2008 has an interesting poll on the pronunciation of this word!), /ˈmæsɑːʒ, -ɑːdʒ /, /ˈmɪstʃɪf / (EPD accepts /tʃi:f/) , /emˈplɔɪiː, ɪm-, əm-/. In this latter case, my own version is accepted /ˌemplɔɪˈiː/ but as the last entry in both pronunciation dictionaries.

List 4: [ʌ] for /ʊ/
Another case of hypercorrection in the words mʌstache, pʌssycat  for /məˈstɑːʃ, mu-/, /ˈpʊsikæt/. In the case of "moustache", American English influence may also be "to blame".
Many of my students also struggle with the word bʌtcher for /ˈbʊtʃə / and  cʌshion for | ˈkʊʃn̩ |.

List 5: Miscellaneous
A few other words I find myself at odds with, include: tournament, handkerchief, gauge, drawer, demise.
I was relieved to see in the dictionary that the first two words also accept my versions:  [ˈtɜːn ə mənt], [ˈhæŋkətʃi:f] and I guess my perceived "error" stemmed from making a spelling-to-sound connection. In the case of the second word, I believe it is the spelling that initially led me into an /i:/ sound.
My versions for the last three words: *[gɔ:dʒ][drɔ:ə][dəmi:z] for the words /ɡeɪdʒ/, /drɔː/, /dɪˈmaɪz /. I guess these three are mispronounced due to different reasons. In the case of "drawer", I thought it was a homophone of the "one who draws", so my analogy backfired here. For "gauge", I don't remember finding another <au> spelling being pronounced in this way and its etymology does not help me at all (I should maybe check the Phonology of Old French!?), so my knowledge of spelling-to-sound connections was used logically, I guess. In the case of demise, I guess it would probably have to do with the fact that the "-ise" ending is generally /aɪz/ in verbs, not nouns, where this ending is generally  /i:z/. So, in spite of applying the rule correctly, I have not pronounced it correctly (such is...English!)

Hope that some of these items of my "shame list" have helped you wonder about the source of your own mispronunciations! (At a very high level of obsession, you'll understand!)

***

To err is human, and "native" speakers of English also engage in frequent pronunciation "errors", and these are reported in some very interesting articles. Some views are really extreme and defo beat my own personal passion, let me tell you!

"8 Pronunciation Errors that made the English language what it is today:" - The Guardian . HERE
"100 Most Often Mispronounced Words in English" HERE
"More than 80% British People Can't Speak Properly" HERE
"17 Everyday Words you may just be Mispronouncing" HERE

Any pronunciation pet-peeves out there? Post them on the "comments" box!

Teaching Segments #1: English /ð, d/ - Part 2: Phonological Processes and "Tips & Tricks"

In one of our previous posts, we talked about the allophonic spit Spanish learners are faced with, from  [ð, d̪] to English /ð, d/. That is, in English, /ð/ and /d/ are two separate sounds, in Spanish, they are two variables of the only phoneme /d/, with some differences in place of articulation as well.

Interlanguage Processes in the Production of /ð, d/ for advanced learners of English with Riverplate Spanish as L1

Let's take the following phrases from the dialogue "At a Party", from Anne Baker (2006) Ship or Sheep, 3rd edition:

In the dark!
They are dancing under the stars!

The Contrastive Analysis hypothesis by Weinreich (1953) and Lado (1957) would establish that after a thorough comparison of phonemic and phonetic inventories of both L1 and L2 that defines what sounds and variants are present or missing in both languages, we can predict that my learners would apply their L1 allophones Spanish [d̪] and [ð], thus:
(Assuming that learners know about the non-rhoticity of GB)

In ðe ðark!
d̪ey are ðancing unðer d̪e stars!

However, we cannot just assume that students, especially if they are advanced learners (B2, C1 level of the CEFR) will just transfer their L1 sounds to the L2.  They may have motivations to do so, and not just because the foreign sounds are not present in their L1, but also, because they may perceive them to be similar. The presence of "inaccurate perceptual targets" is described in Major’s
Similarity/Dissimilarity Hypothesis (2006), which  contends that those features of a language which are perceived as similar will be more difficult to acquire, since they are perceived and interpreted in terms of L1. As established earlier, Spanish /d/ may be heard to be similar to English /d/, as they are both plosives in nature, and the dental and alveolar articulations are not really far away from each other, and something similar may happen to the dental fricative, there being one allophonic variant of /d/ in Spanish under that description. This hypothesis may also explain why other sounds, such as /dʒ/, non-existing in Spanish and only closely associated to /ʃ/ or /tʃ/ by Spanish speaking learners, may be more easily acquired or "approximated to" and sustained if students' attention is drawn to it. (I am not denying the difficulties in articulation this sound brings about, I am just contending that students can self-monitor the production of this sound or an approximate target more consistently than the /ð, d/ distinction which, in my experience, remains a consistent "mistake" even after systematised.)

I am teaching advanced learners of English, with many years of exposure to the language -at least inside the classroom-, and with a certain level of proficiency in grammar, lexis and fluency. It comes as no surprise that these students have made their own hypotheses of what the language sounds like, and many of their "mistakes" are, in fact, developmental in nature. This is in-keeping with Major's (1987) Ontogeny Model that predicts the increase of developmental over transfer processes over time.

Adapted from Mayor (1987) in Ioup and Weinberger (1987)

So this is what many of my students produce:

In d̪e d̪ark! or In de dark!
d̪ey are d̪ancing und̪er d̪e stars! or dey are dancing under de stars!

Most students who master the plosive and alveolar aspect of English /d/ overapply it to cover the contexts for /ð/ as well. This is known as hypercorrection, and it counts as evidence that students are actually learning and making judgements as to how the language works! :D

"Tips and Tricks" to teach /ð, d/

The obvious, first: teaching the spellings of both sounds. But the presence of spellings alone is not enough to ensure learners' self-regulation in the production. So some extra tips may be presented to correct or give feedback in order to allow students to realise they should be producing a different sound:

Hand gestures + articulatory tips and tricks: I like using two gestures to represent these sounds (These gestures are not offensive in my culture, but they may be in yours or your learners', so please check beforehand! No offence intended here!)

This is to ask students to produce an interdental sound rather than dental, since in this way, my students manage to produce a better defined /ð/ sound, and they become aware of the "tickling" sensation the friction produces. (It may always backfire, since some students pull their tongues out too much and this obstaculises a smooth articulation, but all in all, the interdental option works pretty well). I have also found it that with all voiced fricatives I needed to help my students to breathe "properly", encouraging diaphragmatic breathing over their usual "chest-lifting" (needed a word for it!) breathing. Many of my students improved on their production of /ð/  and other voiced fricatives when adopting a straight posture, and pulling the upper part of their "bellies" (just below their ribs) outwards when they produced the sound, somehow increasing the amount of air employed for a smooth friction to take place in the mouth organs. This, in turn, allowed them to loosen some unwanted tension on the neck and jaws, as their attention was placed onto the actual breathing process.

This is to remind students of /d/. I have chosen to focus on either keeping the teeth "softly clenched" or the back molars for the production of /d/. In spite of the fact that the transition from Spanish dental to English alveolar merely implies placing the tip and blade of the tongue further back in the mouth (going from just behind the teeth to the "balcony of the mouth", the alveolar ridge), I have found that the more I ask my students to focus on the tongue for this sound in particular, the more the tongue "reacts" by getting into the dental position. So I have found that asking my students to build a "fortress" in the mouth with the teeth or the molars prevented them from "going dental". (This is not a tip I may exploit with all students, as many students have a very stiff jaw due to stress or tension, and this slight "teeth-clenching" may "spoil" their overall performance and create some distortion in sounds. I'll talk about "stiff jaws" and "flabby tongues" and their effect on articulation and voice quality in some other post)

Some other common tips for /d/ include (sorry if I could not trace the sources here):

• Exploration: exploring the teeth ridge area, playing with the tip of the tongue in different positions from the back of the teeth to the post alveolar area, and attempting different sounds till the right alveolar articulation is found. It allows students to become familiar with the alveolar area, a bit "underused" in Riverplate Spanish. It would sound something like this:

• Marking the territory: I remember reading somewhere about the suggestion that students could define the alveolar area by either putting a finger or pencil or straw behind their teeth (maybe not too hygienic!) to make sure students' tongues produce contact with the alveolar ridge only, or a piece of chewing gum on the right articulatory point (this is a contribution by my colleague Andrea P.) to identify the "right spot". Some people would say this is a bit "invasive", but if treated as a game and in the right conditions, it should be all right.

Now a few tips for /ð/:

• The "tongue" greeting": my trainer always presented this tip which is useful in kinder or primary classes. It involves travelling to an imaginary country, where people greet each other by showing the tip of their tongues, and students walk around the classroom saying "th" as a means of saying "hi" to each other.
• The "tickling" competition: students may be asked to pull the very tip of their tongue between their upper and lower tip and blow slowly, producing a "tickling" sensation. After a short while, this feeling begins to "bother" the lips, the friction and the vibration it produces at times makes students drop the sound. So the competition involves trying to "put up" with the tickling for as long as you can. This is just to draw students' awareness of friction, and what it involves.

There are some videos and tutorials on the web for this sound:

• Two home-made videos I made for my students: /d/ and /ð/ (used to looking ridiculous on the web by now! Sorry about the sound quality!)

Plus:

• BBC Learning Tips, /d/ and /ð/
• Some other videos for Spanish speakers (here and here). Some may be more "effective" and "accurate" than others. You will decide!

Hope you have found this post useful!

References

• Quilis, Antonio (1993). Tratado de Fonología y Fonética Españolas. Madrid: Gredos
• Mott, Brian. (2012) English Phonetics and Phonology for Spanish Speakers. UB: Spain.
• Moyano, G. (1996) A Comparison between English and Spanish consonants. Buenos Aires.
• Major, R.(1987) A Model For Interlanguage Phonology. In Ioup and Weinberger (1987) Interlanguage Phonology. The Acquistion of a Second Language Sound System.Cambridge: Newbury House Publishers
• Monroy Casas, R. (2001) Profiling The Phonological Processes Shaping The Fossilised Il Of Adult Spanish Learners Of English As Foreign Language. Some Theoretical Implications. University of Murcia
• Finch, D. and Ortiz Lira, H.(1982) A Course in English Phonetics for Spanish Speakers.London: Heinemann
• García Jurado, María Amalia y Arenas (2005) La fonética del español: análisis e investigación de los sonidos del habla. Buenos Aires: Quórum
• Ioup, G., & Weinberger, S. (1987). Interlanguage phonology: The acquisition of a second language sound system (Vol. 8). Newbury House.

Teaching Segments #1: English /ð, d/ - Part 1: Exploring phonemic and allophonic differences

I have been teaching general English and English "for international exams" (OMG, I do have a grudge for that) for over ten years now, and I started teaching phonetics at College in 2006. I wouldn't say I'm tooo experienced, but I would say that one of the features I have "corrected" and "systematised" the most among my Spanish-speaking students, is the contrast /ð/,/d/.

Some basic, general remarks for General British /ð/,/d/.:

• General British (GB) has a phonemic contrast between /ð/,/d/. This means that if we apply the process of commutation, through which we change one phoneme of a word for another, then we will have another acceptable English word, creating a minimal pair: "they"/"day", /ðeɪ//deɪ/. This proves that these two are phonemes of English.
• /ð/,/d/ are represented by different spellings in GB as well: /ð/ is generally, if not always, "th", /d/ is unproblematically spelled with "d" or "dd".
• /ð/,/d/ are clearly different in terms of place and manner of articulation, but share the same voice: both sounds are produced with vocal fold vibration. Curious to see what that looks like? Try this video. 
• /d/ is an alveolar sound in terms of its place of articulation, i.e., the tip and blade of the tongue are in contact with the alveolar ridge:

Image credit: http://www.study-languages-online.com/images/sounds/sound-d.gif

•  As far as manner of articulation is concerned, it is a plosive sound, which means that it is produced in three stages: a closure stage, whereby you put your articulators in firm contact, a compression stage in which the air is kept "hostage" behind the closure, and a sudden, "explosive" release (If English is your L1, or you have already "acquired" this sound, you can try this in slow motion). This is generally represented with parametric diagrams like the one below (adapted from Ortiz Lira & Finch, 1982):

• /ð/ is a dental sound, as the tongue articulates with the teeth (Mott 2012:134 states that in English it is generally "dental rather than interdental", though it is more useful in pedagogical terms to go for an interdental articulation, in my humble opinion!). This dental articulation is made fun of in the famous cartoon from the book How to be British:

Regarding manner of articulation, /ð/ is a fricative sound, and instead of presenting any degree of closure, there is a narrow opening between the articulators which creates friction (i.e, "turbulence"):

Fricatives. (Diagram adapted from Ortiz Lira & Finch, 1982)

You can watch an animation of their articulation in the University of Iowa site.

 (Digression alert!) Check out this MRI of a person singing a rap song (It's awesome!). It's great to see what goes on in your mouth cavity as you talk in real time!

What do we know about "d"-related sounds in my Riverplate variety of Spanish?

• We have got only one phoneme, /d/. As García Jurado and Arenas (2005:99) explain, it is an (post)dental plosive ("oclusiva apicodental")

Image credit: University of Iowa-Phonetics http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/spanish/frameset.html

Now. The interesting thing about our Spanish/d/ is that it has two main allophones, that is, two main variants. If you listen to my rendering of the word "dedo" ("finger"), you may notice two different productions of the sound (I'm still at odds with PRAAT's text grid feature...sorry!): 

1. This goes to say that my Riverplate Spanish /d/ has two "versions": a dental plosive [d̪]; and a dental fricative (even approximant at times for some speakers!) [ð], which appears in intervocalic position, and sometimes after nasals as well: ['d̪eðo].

(Not after nasals, my colleague Zabala corrects me. In my articulation it is true it is not a fricative, though I recall having read this somewhere. I'll trace the source)

So the RS learners of General British finds themselves entangled in what is called an allophonic split (Lado, 1957), that is, two allophones of their L1 which are two separate phonemes in their L2 (a "phonemization of allophonic variation", Moore, 2013).

Now. Is it only this split that makes /d, ð/ difficult for Argentinian learners of English? After all, how truly aware are we of the sounds we use in our language, as a general rule?

The answer to this question can to a certain extent, be found in a Contrastive Analysis (Weinreich, 1953), like the one carried out just now. But there may be other psycholinguistic factors also operating which may affect the mispronounciation of /d, ð/ among my learners . Part 2 will explore these phonological processes in more detail, explain some of the most common problems RS learners of English face regarding these sounds, and present some tips and tricks for classroom use.

Pronunciation and I: Intrinsic (!?) Motivation (a bit of a Freudian session)

Pronunciation has been my passion for many years now. I would feel tempted to say it was because of my Phonetics I trainer, Prof. Graciela Moyano, and I would say "certainly, yes!". And I would not be wrong. I am determined to devote a whole post to my wonderful training in Phonetics by Graciela. However, I know there is something about my curiosity about pronunciation that goes back to very early in my life, probably when I was 5 and I was sent to a speech therapist because I could not produce my "rr"s (BTW, I am a native speaker of Riverplate Spanish.  Curious what that means? Wikipedia may enlighten you...a little bit).

A bit of theory first. The "rr" sound is called a voiced alveolar trill, usually known as a "rolling r", and represented thus: [r]. It is a liquid consonant (though Cruttenden 2014:51 points out there is no common agreement on this) and it is a trill because it is produced with intermittent closure between the tip and blade of the tongue with the alveolar ridge. It is a very common sound in Spanish, represented by spelling "r" (initial in the word) and "rr". You can see an animation for the articulation of this sound in the University of Iowa website: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/spanish/frameset.html (Look it up under "vibrantes"). 
You can hear the English frictionless continuant approximant and the Spanish alveolar trill (together with other manifestations of /r/) here. 
This is what the spectogram of my Spanish [r] and my English [ɹ] look like in PRAAT:

And what they sound like: 
(BTW, for some reason at times (not here, I think) my English /r/ includes a labiodental articulation, very much like Johnathan Ross' own [ʋ] and I guess I was trying to avoid it here. I wonder why!)

Here's a video that shows some people attempting to produce a Spanish trill (BTW, that was my "rr" at the age of 5! My Italian granny used to call me "my little Frenchy", at least that was what my /r/ sounded like to her, much to her dismay) and some tips and tricks which may (?) work (I don't really think the protagonist's achieved "rr" is truly alveolar, as there is some sort of velar start to my ear...but I may be wrong!):

You will hear it in Scottish, as this video shows:

I remember my speech therapy sessions quite vividly, which I guess is quite telling. I can recall disliking the speech therapist, a very tall, slender woman, and I get the feeling she was not very patient. I remember she filled a notebook with drawings and words with "rr", nursery rhymes as well: "Erre con erre cigarro, erre con erre barril..." and I was expected to repeat. I don't have any recollection of having been asked to do anything else than repeat. 

After six or seven sessions, she told my mother I had to keep attending sessions, even during the summer break. I remember getting in a tantrum, saying I was not going to go on attending, and my mother politely saying that since I was going to start swimming lessons, I would not be going back to my speech therapy sessions again. I was relieved.

I eventually got the sound "rr" on my own. I was probably not ready for my /r/ before this time (after all, it is one of the last sounds to be acquired,) or there had been, very likely, more articulatory practice in the sessions which my subconscious mind has "blocked".

***

I heard someone say that we choose our profession as a means of healing a past trauma. I don't know if this is the case (this experience competes with the fact that I was locked inside an English Institute when I was 8), but I do believe this was a significant event in my life and there is something about the impression that I was only asked to "repeat" which I react against, now, in my teaching. (Worth another post!)

Thank you for reading me! Any personal experiences to share regarding your /r/ sounds?